21 Responses to 99.87% Of All Peer-Reviewed Papers Say That Humans Caused The Last Ice Age

I knew it! The last Ice Age was all the fault of Fred, Barney and the rest of that nasty stone-age gang! Thank you to the AGW promoters for this valuable insight …. I expect that means deserts are caused by the Road Runner and Wile E Coyote!

Are you incapable or just unwilling to look at science in a more nuanced way? To say humans are the cause of global warming does not imply that climate does not change on its own. What it means is that human activity is impacting climate significantly and materially more than the slow change that would otherwise occur.

It’s also generally accepted that bigfoot does not exist. Nonetheless, bigfoot researchers continue the research because they realize that only hard evidence can bridge the gap between theory and reality.

“Powell “searched the Web of Science, an online science publication tool, for peer-reviewed scientific articles published” in the last 22 years that have the keyword phrases “global warming” or “global climate change” and found 13,950 articles.

Powell found only 24 of the 13,950 articles or 0.17 percent that “clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.”

I would suggest that a change in the search phrase may yield a different percentage. Try “global warming hoax” and see how the numbers come out.

Or, go back to the original search phrase and rule out any sources which had a conflict of interest (monetary, job-related, etc either directly or indirectly) and tally those numbers again. I believe the new count may be something like 24-0.

Just because the vast majorities of studies assume AGW is correct for a starting point and go from there doesn’t make it true. Remove the ones that assume it from the beginning and suddenly that 13 950 number dwindles dramatically. Additionally, though a ridiculous number of papers have assume Newtonian physics to be correct, it has been demonstrated to be false with extremely high confidence.

“A new study finds that 99.82 percent of all scientific papers published in the last two decades on the subject of global warming or global climate change accepted that humans were the cause.”

This is a complex issue to grasp but let me try to give readers the flavour of how this works… Take any social science field; let’s use psychology as an example because that is a field I am technically familiar with.

There is a branch of psychology called psychoanalytics. The researchers who publish in this field have their own journals, their own associations, their own conferences. If you did a survey of all the published literature on psychoanalysis you would pretty much find 99.82% or so, supportive of the field. (This group has their own journals to publish in, after all.)

It is worth noting, however, that almost everybody else outside that field who do work in psychology, consider this work garbage.

In almost every field, the people participating in that field agree with the consensus view because that’s the way they were trained (some would say indoctrined). Thus, it usually takes someone outside of the field to see the flaws and unspoken assumptions, even if they should be plainly obvious.

I’ll use an example that is close to home and is probably uncontroversial. I’m a chemist, so the example is atomic theory. If atomic theory was wrong, I’d probably be one of the last people to figure it out and/or accept it. And that’s simply because that’s all I know. The same is true for nearly all chemists and it’d likely take someone outside of chemistry to figure it out. The thing is, because I’ve dealt with other groups that can’t see their blatant assumptions/flaws, at least I admit that limitation. I recently argued with a person on another blog who claimed his 400-page dissertation was proof of controversial field. I told him I doubted that and instead it likely assumed that field correct, and he should post a link to his dissertation so I could evaluate his claim. Naturally, he never posted the link. I’d like to think I wouldn’t claim my dissertation as proof of atomic theory…

The other confusion, and this arises either from ignorance or because of active spin doctoring, is to compare a well understood field with a poorly understood one. You can have consensus position on string theory and a consensus position on relativity. The consensus position on relativity is going to be very very certain. The consensus on string theory is going to be nearly worthless.

One final note (well, maybe final) – but something like relativity is testable. It falls under the area of exact science. String theory is more borderline, with parts of it possibly being testable, but other parts not (at least as I understand it). Climate science is theoretically testable, but often the posits made aren’t testable due to timescale reasons (which is sometimes legitimate, and will eventually be rectified) or, more often, because no hard predictions with defined uncertainties are given. Other areas, like some of the psychology ones, aren’t testable at all. Additionally, a hypothesis or theory that is so malleable that it can fit any result is also untestable.

Generally speaking, testability is important but not essential in science. For example, evolutionary theory is difficult to test. However, if a theory is difficult to test it should offer other benefits such as internal consistency. CAGW is both difficult to test and internally inconsistent.